A state-aided Bengali-medium primary school in Malda town started registering the attendance of its students in digital format from Tuesday.
All 650 students of Lalit Mohan Shyammohini Primary School have been given smart identity cards embedded with metal chips. A scanner reads the smart identity cards to record the attendance of students.
“It is for the first time that any state-aided primary school in north Bengal has seen digital attendance system for students,” claimed Bhakar Roy, the headmaster of the primary school.
On Tuesday, Lipika Burman Ghosh, the sabhadhipati of Malda Zilla Parishad, reached the school to see how students were being made familiar with the new system.
“The headmaster and teachers of the school approached us for help to launch this digital attendance system. We gave due consideration to the proposal and funded the project,” said Ghosh.
A sum of around ₹4 lakh has been spent on the system, said a source.
Along with the digital attendance, the school, with the help of a private company, developed a mobile app and asked guardians to install it on their cellphones.
“If any guardian opens the app, they can check whether their ward has had the attendance recorded digitally to confirm that the child has reached school,” said Roy.
“We can also use this app to communicate with guardians about classwork, homework and share other information with them,” the headmaster added.
Through the new attendance system, the school authorities can also easily track whether any student is absent for a long period.
A teacher posted in the school said the new system would also help maintain transparency of the midday meal served to students.
Some schools face allegations that the number of meals cooked does not tally with the number of students present in the school, said the teacher.
“There will be no space for such discrepancies anymore as meals would be cooked only for students present in the school,” he said.
Headmaster Roy, however, regretted the insufficient number of teachers.
“From this year, Class V has been added to the primary section. For 650 students, there are only nine permanent teachers. The district primary school council deputed four additional teachers. But for the smooth functioning of the school, we need five more teachers,” he said.